


Daughter Of

by Cynder2013



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Bad Parenting, Canonical Character Death, Discussion of Periods/Menstruation, F/M, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net, POV First Person, Pre-The Second Titan War (Percy Jackson), Swearing, The Second Titan War (Percy Jackson)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:15:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23652937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cynder2013/pseuds/Cynder2013
Summary: Why did I join the Titans? Because I wanted to. What? Isn't that answer good enough? You want the whole story. Fine. You'd better sit down, this is going to take a while. It didn't start until my second summer at camp. It was for me and for my siblings. And maybe for Luke. Just a little.
Relationships: Luke Castellan/Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 15





	1. Hermes

I was in the Hermes cabin for all of my first summer at camp. I slept on the floor near the bunks and got stepped on nearly every morning when we were running around trying to get to breakfast on time, which we were never quite able to manage. There were fights at least once a week when someone stole something and didn't brag and give it back in an acceptable amount of time. The cabin was a mess anyways so sometimes the thing that had been stolen had actually been lost and we just didn't know the difference. There was no personal space and everyone was on top of everyone else and really it was a miracle there weren't fights more often.

It was the best summer I've ever had since finding out I was a half-blood.

Luke was our head counselor. Like most of the girls who weren't his sisters, I had a crush on him. He was friendly and helpful and treated everyone like family. He wasn't bad to look at either. I would have rather been his sister than his girlfriend though, back then. Not only had Annabeth Chase staked her claim, and she was terrifying even as a nine-year-old, but

It's silly really, but I had been pagan, before I found out that my dad wasn't really my dad and my real “dad” was

Hermes had been my patron god. Having him in my life was something that hadn’t changed when everything else had. Being his daughter would have been easy.

But I wasn’t claimed that summer.

The bead was a snake.


	2. Dionysus

My “dad” claimed me the moment I stepped past Thalia’s tree at the start of my second summer and immediately sent me on a quest with two of my siblings to find a missing thing that no one else cared about.

My brother died.

He was ten.

I had known him for a week.

My sister and I made it back to hand over the precious thing and get patted on the head and called by each other’s name. My “dad” didn’t even look at me. Not once.

We couldn’t bring back my brother’s body, so we burnt an empty shroud. It was green, his favourite colour.

My sister cried. I didn’t cry. I went to the arena and destroyed training dummies with a sword that nearly cut my foot off because it was so unbalanced.

Luke’s quest got back a few days later. He brought back one body to burn with its shroud when there should have been two and a deep cut on his face from a dragon claw. He brought back the claw too. He didn’t bring back the golden apples.

We met in the arena with the same idea and ended up in the forest hunting for anything that could kill us. Maybe we both wanted to die, and with a heroic death we’d at least end up in Elysium, right?

I don’t remember what we killed, but afterwards, covered in monster dust, I said

I remember saying that wasn’t it funny, two quests gone south in the same summer? And wasn’t it funny that Luke’s quest had failed when all he was doing was copying what Heracles did? Wasn’t it funny? Wasn’t it?

And I laughed and laughed and laughed until I cried.

Luke hugged me. He said

I remember him saying that it wasn’t funny, it was sad. Why did the gods treat us like this? Then he stopped and said he was going to teach me to sword fight, like he did last summer, only I needed a better sword.

The armory at Camp Half-Blood was a lean-to shed attached to the forge back then. Luke went right to the rack of swords and took down a celestial bronze longsword that was almost as tall as me. When I told him that there was no way I could fight with that he just looked at me and said I’d grow.

The bead for that summer was the flaming trireme that destroyed the armory. Why was that so important? Well, aside from destroying a good chunk of our weapons, it taught everyone an important lesson about never letting the kids in cabin nine work with Dionysus’s sons on anything involving explosives.


	3. Ares

My parents had split up over the summer. They weren't divorced, but my dad had taken his things and rented a small apartment near his workplace. My little brother and I lived in our house with our mom and learned that when she cried I should leave her alone and he should go comfort her. After all, Dad had left because of me.

The gods sleep around, and mortals weep.

I carried my sword around, hanging from my hip and covered in Mist, and practiced with it every day. I used it to kill one of my teachers who turned out to be some weird centaur with horns who wanted to eat me.

At the beginning of December I asked my mom if I could have a friend over for Christmas. She said yes and I IMed Luke that night. He flew over on a pegasus with the story of how he'd had to avoid Mr.D’s grape vines on the way out when the god tried to take back his permission to leave. Once we’d explained that Mr. D was a god, my brother thought that Luke was the coolest guy ever.

My mom wasn't too happy that my friend was an older boy, but she let Luke stay and sometimes he managed to make her laugh.

Luke slept in the guest room and practiced sword fighting in the basement with me every night. I always ended up with his sword at my throat, but we didn't call him the best swordsman at camp for nothing. Lasting as long as I did against him was an accomplishment.

It was around that time that I started having the dreams. There was a voice in the dark that I couldn't quite hear. It was raspy, like it hadn't been used in a long time, and it wanted

I would wake up in the middle of the night and be sure that the darkness in my room was looking back at me.

Luke stayed until a few days after Christmas. I'd given him a set of lockpicks and a padlock to practice on, for when he was in the middle of one of those head counselor meetings he had complained about. His gift to me was a copy of Homer's Odyssey in the original Ancient Greek, because likely as not we’d run into the monsters in there someday, if we lived long enough.

I spent most of that summer in the arena. There were the usual scheduled lessons with my cabin, plus pretty much all of my free time. I even snuck out at night once or twice, but that was before I got used to the dreams, and before we got more security harpies.

A new armory had been built during the year. It looked like a garden shed but it was made entirely of metal. It was also parked next to the Athena cabin, which was good since Athena’s kids were the best equipped to handle any disasters if the armor of the new armory didn’t work. The wall of the cabin that the armory was built next to didn’t have a window though, and neither did the wall of the armory facing it. That quickly made it a favourite place for the Hermes kids to conduct business and for people to meet who probably shouldn’t otherwise be seen together. There were even bushes that seemed to grow just for the purpose of hiding people from view.

I did say that I only spent most of my summer in the arena that year. The rest of it was spent in that space between the Athena cabin and the armory with Luke, reading a book that I’d borrowed from the Athena cabin, it was called The War Art or something like that and was written by an ancient Chinese military strategist, while Luke cleaned weapons or practiced lock-picking. No one ever missed me and Luke had gotten a reputation for going off by himself for hours with no one knowing where he was that had started after his quest.

It was in that spot near the end of that summer that Luke told me that he had been having dreams too. We had been in the same one the night before. We were standing near a dark pit that went on and on, down and down. There were many of us. I stood next to Luke and a younger boy, he was maybe eleven or twelve, with green eyes and dark hair, but the line stretched out far in either direction. The voice, the one that had whispered in my dreams before, spoke. He spoke to us. He promised us a better life. He promised us revenge. And then, after the rest of us left, he spoke to Luke.

At least, Luke saw me there. He told me he saw me. The others came

This was back at the beginning of everything. You can’t expect me to remember it perfectly.

But I know that Luke said, I know he said, “Everything is going to change.”

The bead that summer was a centaur in a prom dress. One of Athena’s daughters had graduated from high school but not gone to her prom, and the Aphrodite kids would not stand for that. Someone, probably Luke’s siblings, had gotten an invitation out to a group of centaurs called the Party Ponies and the rest is history.


	4. Hephaestus

I couldn’t make it through the year at home. There was a mess of divorce proceedings and I was repeating grade twelve English again because I had failed it the last two times and because of some school rule I had to take at least three classes so I was in auto shop and gym too but that wasn’t enough to stop me from wanting to scream my head off. I needed a break. 

I ended up at camp through the winter holiday, which coincided with the Winter Solstice and the field trip to Olympus where Luke stole Zeus’s Master Bolt and Hades’s Helm of Darkness. Really, the gods paid so little attention to us that they’re lucky Luke was only ordered to steal the Bolt and the Helm. It would have been beyond easy to take Apollo’s lyre or Hephaestus’s hammer or anything else we wanted. I watched, and Luke didn’t even need the Titan magic that we had been learning in our dreams. The gods were arrogant.

They did notice that the Bolt was missing. Everyone noticed that right away. We were still on Olympus though, while Zeus shouted and caused storms and sent Artemis, Ares and Athena out after the thief. They didn’t say a word to us. I don’t think it even crossed their minds that one of Chiron’s half-bloods would have stolen from them, even Hades, who was too mistrusting to say a word about his Helm being missing. We were supposed to be loyal to the gods. Loyal, when they treated us like

I dreamed of it when Luke was caught. When he fought Ares and came so close to winning. When he talked his way out of it with one word: War.

No one even noticed that Luke was gone. Even Annabeth was too distracted by the rampaging god who would likely have killed us all if he had remembered that we existed.

Luke came back to Olympus. I went home for the rest of the semester, passed my final exams, and was back at Camp Half-Blood by my birthday in February. Lucky eighteen.

Camp was still fairly full in winter. The Hermes cabin was only slightly less packed than it was during the summer, it had the most campers and the most year-rounders. Luke and I quickly fell back into our nearly daily meetings between the armory and the Athena cabin. I wrote summoning spells and drew battle formations in the dirt, while Luke brooded and tried to catch up on the sleep he was losing to nightmares.

We were both waiting.

Then, just before the summer session started, Luke had a dream. The Titan Lord spoke to him. He told him that a half-blood would come who would carry the Bolt and the Helm to Tartarus, who would ensure war between the gods. Luke told me about it, and he smiled.

I had a dream the next night, and somehow I woke up holding a sliver of stone from the depths of Tartarus. We used that stone to curse a pair of flying shoes that Luke had stolen from his father. We cursed those shoes to drag whoever was wearing them into the Pit, and then Luke gave them to the half-blood.

Perseus Jackson, son of Poseidon.

Those shoes were supposed to work. There was supposed to be war that summer, but there wasn’t. Because Perseus Jackson, the hero of the century, managed to actually succeed in his quest. He didn’t have to bring back the bodies of his companions or know that they were being digested by a dragon. Perseus Jackson saved the day.

The bead that summer was a blue trident on a black background. I smiled and cheered and wore it on my necklace when what I really wanted to do was spit on it and throw it in a fire.

When Luke left I knew exactly where he was going. I didn’t need a twelve-year-old to tell me that he had betrayed the gods. I didn’t need Silena Beauregard to hide the scythe charm on her bracelet and say that, no, she wasn’t talking to someone when I ran into her behind the armory.

I just needed to wait.


	5. Athena

My mom was mad that I wasn’t going to collage. I ignored her. Got a job at the library even though it took me hours to shelve books. Killed monsters. Dreamed.

Waited.

In October, Luke came to visit. My brother was happy to see him, my mom not so much. I think that maybe she blamed him for me “not living up to my potential”. He was the only other half-blood she’d ever met. She should have blamed my “dad”.

Anyway, Luke stayed the night and in the morning he just said, “It’s time.”

I took my sword, nectar and ambrosia, and some clothes. I left my camp necklace in a drawer in my bedside table.

I almost left without saying goodbye. Instead, I lied and told my mom we were going on a quest.

It wasn’t really a lie. It was a quest, just not for the gods.

Luke teleported us to the ship. Teleporting always felt like getting squeezed through a straw. Maybe it was because Luke and I weren’t children of Hecate. When Alabaster teleported someone they didn’t even notice until their location changed.

Anyway, Luke teleported us to the ship, the _Princess Andromeda._ We didn’t have an army, yet, but all of the half-bloods who had joined us so far were on the upper deck, training. I recognized a few people from camp, a daughter of Ares, a son of Hecate who had slept in the Hermes cabin, Chris Rodriguez. It was obvious that Luke had personally trained every single one of us. We were as much his as we were the Titan Lord’s.

Is that ironic, considering what happened later? I think it could be but

We were all trained by Luke, but I was the one he named his second-in-command. I knew, we all knew, that it was only until Annabeth joined us. Everyone who had been at camp was sure it wouldn’t be long. After all, Annabeth had always

Well, I was the replacement Annabeth. It sounds bad, I know, but I could do planning and fighting and arguing and protecting and that was what we needed then. We trained, sailed around gathering more half-bloods. I wasn’t happy when the monsters joined us, but they were a necessary evil. The mortals were more annoying. We needed at least three half-bloods to keep the Mist over their eyes at all times. It got easier once more children of Hecate arrived.

Alabaster and Lou Ellen joined us in April. Alabaster had his Mistforms and sword that he lost later, Lou Ellen had elder python venom and a poisoned knife that she gave to Ethan Nakamura. We used the venom to poison Thalia’s tree. It was Chris’s job. He was the fastest, it only made sense.

We kept training.

Alabaster and I had done the research on the Golden Fleece. It wasn’t that hard to find, but getting it was another story. You know that’s why we poisoned the tree, so we wouldn’t have to waste time doing that hard work. There were other things that needed to get done.

And then Perseus Jackson showed up on our ship. Perseus Jackson, Annabeth Chase, and a cyclops. What was the cyclops’s name? Tyler? Tyson. Perseus Jackson, Annabeth Chase and Tyson the Cyclops, ruining our plan. Clarisse shares some of the blame, of course, but it’s so much more satisfying to blame everything on the son of Poseidon.

We kept training.

Lou Ellen and I went to New Orleans. By the time we came back with the cursed jewels that we were going to make into weapons the Party Ponies had come and gone, and Clarisse had taken the Fleece to camp. 

But there’s always a back-up plan. I just hated the back-up plan. Everyone hated the back-up plan. Nobody wanted that honor, but after we lost the Fleece we didn’t have a choice.


	6. Aphrodite

Things changed after we lost the Fleece. We trained as hard as we possibly could. Any risk of failing a mission had to be eliminated. The Titan Lord made it clear what the price was for failure. There was a boy who went to recruit the di Angelo siblings, a son of Khione without enough of a scent to tip off any satyrs. He failed. He didn’t bother coming back. He fell on his sword.

Luke couldn’t show that he was scared. He wasn’t scared. Luke wasn’t scared yet. We planned, we prepared, we figured out how to kidnap a goddess.

Atlas loved the plan.

That’s how it was during the day. Training, planning, not failing, stopping the monsters from eating the mortals. Not failing. During the night

Most nights, Luke came to visit me. We would talk and swordfight. We would rage and cry. We would sit in silence until we fell asleep. We would read picture books that mortal children had left behind when we dropped them off in Florida. We would look out the window at the stars and the sea. We would pretend that we weren’t half-bloods, that we were normal, just a couple of kids out on a boat, having the most adventure that they would ever see. We would kiss and pretend we hadn’t when the sun rose. We would do so many things other than have sex. Oh, we did that too and it was nice when I didn’t think too much.

They called me Luke’s whore. Not everyone, but enough. Beating them up didn’t help much, I couldn’t kill them and they knew it, but it made me feel a little better. I was still Annabeth’s replacement, or maybe Thalia’s, I wasn’t sure, but I deserved some respect in my own right.

And then we baited our trap. Can you believe we drew straws to see who would take the sky from Atlas? All of us lieutenants, except for Chris, who hadn’t gotten back from scouting out the Labyrinth and was starting to worry us, not that anyone showed it, and Luke. By some meddling from the Titan Lord or pure dumb luck, Luke drew the short straw. He held up the sky and, well, you know the rest.

Alabaster sent a Mistform bird to call me to the upper deck. I was happy to get away from the utterly useless maps of the Labyrinth that I was studying but then I saw Luke lying on the deck looking absolutely terrible and I wanted to go back to the maps. Luke had gotten kicked off of Mount Tamalpais by Thalia and Alabaster had just managed to teleport him back to the ship before he became a blood splatter. Alabaster should have teleported him somewhere else, like a live volcano or the surface of the moon, because, despite all the planning and grey hair, Luke had failed.

Better to die than to fail the Titan Lord, even if Luke did

We knew who was getting that honor. Luke didn’t even let us pity him while he recovered. He went off with Alabaster one day and came back invulnerable.

Silena told us when Chris showed up at Camp Half-Blood. Well, she told me because it was the day that Luke was gone and he had left the scythe charm with me. She said that Clarisse had told her that Chris didn’t know where he was or who anyone was, he had gone mad in the Labyrinth, he kept calling Clarisse by Mary’s name. Mary Germanotta was a quiet daughter of Hecate who had gone to scout the Labyrinth with Chris. She and Lou Ellen were best friends and she and Chris were in that honeymoon stage of starting to date.

We assumed that Mary was dead. Lou Ellen cried for a week.

Things started to change. The Titan Lord wouldn’t let us take any half-blood who wanted to join up anymore, they had to be tested, and the tests were usually deadly if they failed. Maybe he didn’t want to lose people he knew were competent by sending them off on dangerous missions. Lou Ellen made friends with one of the few half-bloods who had passed, a daughter of Eileithyia named Emily, who collected the blood needed to re-forge the Titan Lord’s scythe. Seemingly to make up for the half-bloods who didn’t make it, more monsters appeared on the ship. She-demons, old monsters, you know, things that we had never seen before. Luke wasn’t happy about it, but Luke wasn’t really in charge anymore. It was like he was already a puppet.

Somehow, despite the useless maps, Luke and a few others, including a new recruit who had survived his test, made it through the Labyrinth and found Ariadne's string. Of course, Perseus Jackson was around to make things more difficult than they had to be. Luke gathered us lieutenants and we prepared for battle. One of the old monsters would carry the string and lead the army through the Labyrinth. Ryan Laurence, a son of Apollo, would actually lead the army. He had never been to camp before. None of the half-bloods going with the army had been to camp before. That was a choice we made to save our own sanity. For some of us, camp had been a home and having to destroy it would hurt too much.

We already hurt enough.

Luke asked me and Alabaster to stay behind after the meeting. He just said, “It’s time.” We knew what he was talking about.

I told him, “I’m going with you.” He didn’t want me there, but I insisted. I was going with him, I was going to be with him until he was gone, because I was an idiot who had fallen in love with him.

I kissed him in front of Alabaster, I didn’t care what other people thought anymore, and then Luke lay down in the Titan Lord’s sarcophagus and went still. Absolutely still. Alabaster levitated the sarcophagus and we walked it all the way up to Mount Othrys. The new recruit, Ethan, was lurking by the entrance to the Labyrinth up there with some of the less old monsters who were carrying the Titan Lord’s scythe.

Alabaster gave me a look when I stayed behind with the sarcophagus. I’m sure he thought that I was being ridiculous.

The monsters got excited when the sarcophagus seemingly opened on its own. I saw it as Luke trying to escape before it was too late.

Call me a hopeless romantic, I’ve heard it before.

Ethan pledged himself to the Titan Lord because what have the gods ever done for us? We die for them and they

The Titan Lord called Luke “the body” like he had never been a person. I didn’t have time to be angry though, because of course Perseus Jackson was there. He only got away because of the wall of stone that cut us off. Isn’t it great to have a child of Hades on your side? Can you imagine how the war would have gone if we had even one child of the Big Three on our side?

We knew we were beaten at Camp Half-Blood when none of the fighters came back except for a few children of Hecate who had enough power to teleport out when the tide turned against us. Lou Ellen was one of them. She couldn’t form sentences for days after.

The Titan Lord was not happy.


	7. Demeter

We went back to planning. The storm giant was waking and the Titan Lord wanted our attack on Olympus to take place when the gods were away fighting the giant. It seemed totally possible that the Titan Lord would slow down time so that we could get every detail perfect, and he did, sort of. We didn’t even notice until us female half-bloods pooled data and figured out that we were all experiencing a distinct lack of periods over the past two months. Lou Ellen’s friend Emily was the one who linked the Titan Lord’s presence with all of us, female and male, having to eat and sleep less. I don’t even think he was doing it on purpose; he just wanted us to spend as much time as possible making sure we won.

The Titan Lord told us about the plan to blow up our ship as soon as the plans were finalized. By “us” I mean the lieutenants and then we were supposed to tell the people he deemed important enough to get off the ship ahead of time. If we had listened to him then half of the half-bloods on the ship would have died. Instead we made sure that a few rumors got out and almost all of the half-bloods were prepared to abandon ship on the day that Silena told us the attack was coming. I may have made sure that a few select people didn’t get the memo, and I know some of the others did too. Living on a ship with people for three years, some personal vendettas are sure to come up.

I didn’t like being called a whore.

I wasn’t on the ship when it was destroyed. Lieutenants and those deemed important had been evacuated to our new base camp in Aunty Em’s Garden Gnome Emporium. There were plenty of monsters with us too. Half-bloods who had been left behind on the ship teleported in with various injuries from the explosion and the trampling that followed. It took us some time to put them back together again, but they were alive. That was the important thing.

We ended up with a little less than three quarters of our original army of half-bloods. We would morn our dead once the battle was won. No one was crying over the monsters that had died.

I don’t remember how long it was before Silena told us that the half-bloods on your side were leaving camp. It felt like a long time, but it couldn’t have been that long. Maybe the Titan Lord’s presence was screwing with us even more, or just screwing with me more since I worked closely with him. I’m pretty sure I was the only female who hadn’t had her period once since he rose.

I mean, that was because

Oh, forget it. You’re not here for my medical history.

So, the Titan Lord assigned me to lead the force attacking the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, for obvious reasons. The soldiers were mostly monsters but I had Lou Ellen and a few of her siblings with me.

One of Lou Ellen’s brothers created the skeletal horses that half-bloods rode to attack the Williamsburg Bridge. Alabaster was really proud of him. To attack the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel another son of Hecate, Sean, decided that we had to ride in on dragons. So he summoned dragons.

The dragons were fire-breathing, so they were able to burn away the plants that the Demeter cabin grew to guard the tunnel. Of course, that meant that they were targeted and killed first. Your side did well; the three dragons we had were all dead in less than fifteen minutes.

The Demeter cabin was still growing plants but it was fresh growth that was fairly easy for the monsters to get past. When that wasn’t possible I would command the plants to die back, but it was difficult. My powers are meant to make plants grow, not die, and there was only one of me. My siblings made plants grow faster than I could make them die and soon the tunnel was completely blocked. We wouldn’t be getting into Manhattan that way any time soon.

We kept trying to get through the tunnel—we didn’t have any other orders after all—but retreated at sunrise. We made it through that battle down half our monsters and one half-blood, Sean.

Then the Titan Lord sent me back to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel with the Titan of the Sun to tear down the plants and create a another entrance. The Titan of the Sun burnt all the plants around him and I did my best to make them shrivel up and die.

Of course, I ended up overextending my powers and passed out.

I think the Titan of the Sun carried me back to our base camp. I had burns when I woke up that I didn’t remember getting while working with him to clear the tunnel. At least we cleared enough space to send a small part of the army through.

Apparently I was out for the entire night. I missed the real start of the invasion because Lou Ellen refused to let me be woken up. I was pretty mad at her for that but the middle of a war wasn’t the right place to be angry at one of your only friends so I didn’t yell at her or anything. I at least got to be part of the force attacking Olympus. That was

It was nice of you to clear the streets for us. The monsters wouldn’t have minded trampling sleeping mortals on the way to the Empire State Building, but most of us half-bloods weren’t so gung-ho about it. Sure, the mortals would probably all die horrible deaths after the Titans took over but we didn’t have to be the direct cause of that.

The Titan Lord gave a rousing speech that I don’t remember a word of. There was probably something in there about crushing our enemies. My head was spinning, from overextending myself or from adrenaline, I’m not sure which. It could have been both. Then he led the army to Olympus.

Every half-blood was in full armor and carrying multiple weapons. I had a spear and a dagger in addition to the longsword that Luke had picked out for me. Lou Ellen started out beside me, but we got separated a few minutes into the fighting. After my spear broke when I stabbed this one Hunter, I somehow ended up fighting with Chris. Silena had told us that he was sane again and dating Clarisse, but it was still a bit of a surprise to be facing him knowing that he would kill me if I gave him the chance.

Wouldn’t he kill me? I was the enemy now. I would have killed him. I wouldn’t even have hesitated.

I wouldn’t.

I

Anyway, it was a good thing that it was me fighting him. Chris was Luke’s student and was one of the ones who could keep up with Luke the longest, a category that I also fell into. It was exhausting trying to keep ahead of Chris and I couldn’t afford to get distracted. We didn’t even stop fighting when the Titan army was twenty feet from the doors.

Then the Lord of the Dead arrived.

Chris and I both faltered. I felt terrified and wanted to run for the hills, I could tell that Chris felt the same. We stood facing each other, breathing hard and waiting for the other person to make the first move. Then I just barely felt the magic keeping the city asleep collapsing. The cars around us roared to life. It surprised Chris, he wasn’t as good with magic as me, and I took the opportunity to attack him.

It was a bad idea because Chris wasn’t as distracted as I thought he was. He parried easily and I ended up smashing a car window with my sword. Then he disarmed me and kicked my leg while I was off balance so I would fall to the ground.

I was dead.

Chris had his sword raised and was seconds away from bringing it down on me when Lou Ellen shouted at him. I don’t remember when she got close to us, but I will always remember what she said.

She said, “Don’t kill her, she’s pregnant.”

If I had been holding my sword I probably would have dropped it like Chris did with his. We were lucky he managed to catch it before the blade hit one of us. We both said something intelligent like, “What?” and then Chris stabbed the monster that was lunging at him over my head.

Lou Ellen fought her way to my side, cutting through enemies and allies alike, while I spat out monster dust and Chris blinked and shook his head. She told me, “You’re pregnant.”

I think that I must have just said Luke’s name, that’s all that I was thinking anyway, and Chris suddenly looked less dazed. He swore and held out a hand to help me up just like he used to when we sparred on the ship. I took it.

Lou Ellen and I waited for the fighting to end in the back room of a store that Chris had broken into. I cried, a lot. I cried more than Katie had after our quest. It would have been embarrassing if I actually cared.

So, we waited, and eventually Chris came back to bring us to Olympus. We argued, until Chris said that there was a general amnesty for the gods who had sided with the Titans, and the Lord of the Sky had promised that the Titan Lord’s half-bloods who were still alive would have a chance to get the same. The Olympians wouldn’t kill us.

The half-bloods in the Titan Lord’s army would were able to run did. Emily was long gone by the time we got to Olympus. She had told Lou Ellen that I was pregnant so, in a way, I owe her my life. I’ve never gotten to thank her. I have no idea where she is now or if she’s even alive. Alabaster had been badly injured sometime after Chris hid us and he ended up in front of the Olympians after he was healed, at the same time as me and Lou Ellen.

Lou Ellen was pardoned, Alabaster and I were not.

Do you know what our punishments were? What, you thought I was away from the safety of camp for the fun of it? I’m not allowed in New York. New York State. My mom and brother live in Kingston and I’m not allowed to go there. I’m especially not allowed in Camp Half-Blood, just like Alabaster. We were both banished so that we couldn’t corrupt any other half-bloods. I’m sure we weren’t the only ones.

That’s my story, Perseus...Percy Jackson. I don’t know why you thought you needed to come all the way here to ask me why I joined the Titans. Isn’t it obvious? I was angry, Percy. I was angry that my “dad” didn’t care about us and I wanted her to notice me. I was the only child of Demeter to join the Titans you know, and I made Luke promise that we’d keep our siblings safe. We were angry and we wanted to make things better.

Do I still hate the gods? Of course I still

I’m not angry anymore. Not really. I’m just...tired. I’m tired of the running and the fighting. I have a seven month old baby to take care of and my boyfriend does his best to help but he’s got his own problems and I’m tired, I’m just so tired. 

A Roman camp? In _California_?

Tell me more.


End file.
